


Ache

by deerntheheadlights



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Beth Greene Lives, F/M, Fix-It, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Post-Episode: s05e08 Coda (Walking Dead), Reunions, Team Delusional (Walking Dead)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-12 06:02:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29255634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deerntheheadlights/pseuds/deerntheheadlights
Summary: Daryl was alive. He made it out of the house. He found the others. He found her. And now it was her turn to find him—all of them, but him especially.After Beth's death, Daryl looks back on the time they spent together after the prison fell. Beth—alive and mostly well but separated from the others—travels north with Morgan in the hopes of being reunited with Daryl and the rest of their family once and for all.
Relationships: Daryl Dixon/Beth Greene, Maggie Greene/Glenn Rhee, Rick Grimes/Michonne, Rosita Espinosa/Abraham Ford
Comments: 11
Kudos: 40





	1. Greene

**Author's Note:**

> **Canon Typical Violence**
> 
> Flashbacks italicized

Maggie’s sobbing echoed through the church from the altar where she’d collapsed into Glenn’s arms to the space away from the others where Daryl sat motionless, silent, and empty. Rick, Michonne, Carl, and Judith huddled in one corner while the others scattered throughout the nave in varying degrees of shock. They’d been back at the church for nearly 2 hours and no one had spoken yet except for Glenn’s platitudes whispered into Maggie’s ear ad nauseum and the handful of words Abraham said to Rick when they’d first arrived.

Carol approached Daryl like a wounded animal caught in a trap; cautiously with her hands raised just enough that, if he’d been looking, he would have seen the water bottle and rag she was holding. She sat down across from him, his back against one of the walls and hers towards the altar. Normally, the kind of attention and care she brought to the table made him uncomfortable but, in that moment, he was so far removed from his own reality that the thought of putting up a fight never even crossed his mind.

“I’m just gonna clean you up, okay?” 

Daryl didn’t respond, only stared further and further off into the distance feeling number than he’d ever felt before.

“I’m so sorry, Daryl,” she said, gently running the damp rag over his cheek. It felt cool against his skin. He was malleable, letting her turn his head this way and that, picking up his arm to wash the blood— _her_ blood—off of his hands.

* * *

_He didn’t know it was love until he watched her hit the floor—and then it was too late._

_Daryl pulled the trigger without a second thought. Without a first thought, really. It was like he was watching himself shoot her in the third person, like a movie or a night terror or a bad trip. One time, in his late teens, Merle talked him into dropping acid and he’d had a trip so horrible he had a panic attack in the bathtub and vowed to never do it again ever under any circumstance. Maybe it was like that. Maybe he’d blink and when he opened his eyes he’d be back on that porch or in his cell at the prison or curled up in the bathtub in his shitty apartment—no apocalypse, only a drug-induced nightmare._

_If it was only a dream, then why were his ears still ringing? If it was only a dream, then why could he taste her blood in his mouth?_

_People around him yelled back and forth at each other, but he couldn’t understand what they were saying over the sound of his own heartbeat pounding so hard it was surely cracking ribs. He couldn’t breathe. A hand on his arm brought him back into his body and suddenly everything was very, very, very real._

_With a shallow, shaky, gasping breath Daryl looked down and saw her—saw Beth._

_She was still; completely still laid out on her back. It almost looked like she was sleeping except Daryl knew Beth didn’t sleep on her back, she slept on her side with her left arm as a pillow and her right hand on her knife. The blood pooling around her head soaked into her hair and turned it a sickly shade of pink at the ends. Daryl went to his knees—fell to his knees—next to her and reached out a hesitant hand._

_Keeping time was a luxury at the end of the world, one they hadn’t really been privileged to the farm; in that hallway, however, time seemed to cease to exist altogether. A human being can only go 3 minutes without air and it could’ve been more than a few seconds, maybe a minute, between the first shot, his shot, and finding himself knelt at her side, but it felt like he’d been suffocating for hours._

_“Greene…?”_

_Daryl lifted her arm from where it laid haphazard in space between them. He pressed two fingers to the inside of her wrist to feel for a pulse. It was the first time he’d touched her in over a month; since the night at the funeral home when he carried her to the kitchen— he’d told it was because she was too slow, but he’d only wanted an excuse to touch her even though he knew he didn’t need one. When he couldn’t find a pulse in her wrist, he tried her neck._

_And then he saw the hole in her head._

_“No no no no no no…I’m sorry, Beth… I’m so sorry I’m so sorry,” he said it over and over like a prayer, like maybe if he said it enough times God would take pity on him and she’d wake up. But she didn’t wake up. She wasn’t going to wake up._

_He pulled her into his lap and held her limp form close to his chest, whispering apologies into her ear._

* * *

_The herd came out of nowhere. Or, they were attracted by Maggie’s wailing in the courtyard and the others, blinded by their own grief, didn’t realize the severity of the problem it’d created until it was right on top of them going for their necks. They ran 10 blocks and were only just rounding a burnt-out department store when they were headed off at the pass by a second heard even larger than the one they were already attempting to shake._

_Rick led them down a side street and through a parking lot attached to what had once been the kind of upscale bank used by suits with 401ks and tropical vacation homes. A handful of decent looking SUVs and a few sedans scattered the lot. Down the street, the shuffling, moaning, and groaning got louder and louder as the heard got closer and closer to the meal they were promised._

_“Check the cars!” Michonne yelled. “We need to go now!”_

_Gunshots echoed as Sasha took out the first of the walkers. The heard would be on top of them in minutes; there was nowhere to go, nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide._

_“Hey. Hey! Hey!! Daryl!!”_

_He didn’t even register Abraham standing in front of him until he heard his own name. Rick put his hands on Daryl’s shoulders and squeezed._

_“Stay with me brother,” he said. “We need you.”_

_“You gotta get one of those cars started now or we’re fucked!”_

_“Abraham will hold her for you. I won’t let anything happen to her; I swear. We have to get out of here, now, brother. We gotta get back to Carl and Judith, we have to get out of here.”_

_Daryl looked down at Beth, her blood soaked into his shirt and covered both of his arms. He hadn’t put her down once; not when he carried her down 5 flights of stairs, not when he took her outside to see her sister and nearly collapsed himself, not until he found somewhere to put her to rest proper. She deserved that. He owed her that much._

* * *

_“Quit fighting! We gotta go!”_

_“No! No! Get off me I ain’t leavin’ her!”_

_“We don’t have a choice!”_

_“Fuck you!!”_

_“Fuck me?! I’m saving your ungrateful fuckin’ life!”_

_“Leave me here then! I’m not goin’ without her!!!”_

_It took 3 of them to hold him back. He screamed and begged and cried and a whole lot of other undignified shit as they pulled him away from the trunk and towards the waiting van._

* * *

Abraham stood behind the pulpit like a preacher on Sunday sporting the shiner Daryl gave him when they got back to the church.

“We need to talk about DC.”


	2. Just Bait!

Bright.

It was too bright. Like walking out of a movie theatre into the afternoon sun. She had a crick in her neck something awful and a throbbing migraine behind her eyes.

“Holy shit…” a voice said, and she was awake all at once with a start. On instinct, she grabbed the object nearest her hand—a tire iron, to her luck—and brandished it above her head ready to strike.  
“Woah! Wait! Friend, not foe! I’m not gonna hurt you!”

She froze mid-swing but kept a firm grip on the tire iron. In the moment it took for her eyes to adjust to the light she realized she had no idea what was going on. A man’s face came into focus in front of her. He was tall, older-- _older like Rick not like daddy_ , she thought. He held his hands above his head and took a step closer.

“I swear, I’m not going to hurt you. I didn’t know you were in there. Are you okay?”

_In there? In where??_

She lowered her weapon and frantically took stock of her surroundings.

_I’m in a truck. Why am I in a trunk? Where is everyone?_

“I…I don’t know…”

“My name is Morgan,” he took another step forward and offered out his hand. “What’s yours?”

“Beth. Beth Greene.”

* * *

“Here, thought you might want this,” Abraham said cautiously, holding out a bracelet to Daryl. Beth’s bracelet—or, one of them at least. “I took them off her when I… I gave the rest to Maggie and—I’m sorry. I did what I had to do. But I am sorry.”

Daryl worried the stone beads between his fingers but didn’t respond—not that Abraham expected him to, Daryl hadn’t really spoken more than a handful of words in the couple of days since Grady. If you don’t have anything nice to say you shouldn’t say anything at all, right? And Daryl didn’t have anything nice to say. Not to anyone. Not to Maggie who hasn’t stopped crying despite never believing Beth was alive in the first place. Not to Rick who promised nothing would happen to her and then let Abraham leave her in the trunk of some car. And especially not in response to the almost constant worried looks tossed his way by Carol, Rick, Michonne, and every other member of their stupid “family.” Some family they were. Beth practically raised that Rick’s baby and what thanks did she get? Abandonment. And by the people who were supposed to protect her.

Bullshit.

The bracelet felt heavy on his wrist.

* * *

“My family,” she said, “Did you see my family?” Morgan helped her out of the trunk and held onto her shoulder when she wobbled on her feet.

“I haven’t seen anyone else.”

“They were here. They came to rescue me. He came for me like I knew he would and—” Beth cut herself off with a grimace when pain shot through her head. She reached up and grabbed her forehead but pulled her hand away when she realized it was damp. Blood. She was covered in blood. _Ohmygodohmygodohmygod_ the panic set in immediately.

“I was shot…” she whispered. “She shot me and….and they think I’m dead!!”

“Hey now, you need to keep calm alright?”

“Calm?? I just climbed out of my own grave!! They left me here! I got shot and they think I’m dead and they left me here!!” Under normal circumstances, the idea of having a full breakdown in front of a stranger would’ve been horrifying but given that the present reality was already more horrifying than anything she could’ve possibly imagined, she made an exception and sobbed openly into Morgan’s chest.

He froze stiff like a statue before bringing his hand up to pat Beth awkwardly on the shoulder.

“Shh, we need to be quieter or we’ll bring the dead down on us. A lot of them came through here a couple of days ago.”

“Sorry…I don’t know what to do… I don’t even know how I’m alive…”

“Why don’t you stick with me for now, okay? I’ll help you fix your wound up.”

“I have to find my family.”

“I’m looking for someone too, maybe we can work together.”

Beth eyed him warily, he hadn’t tried anything so far but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t. By the same token, it wasn’t like she had a ton of options at her disposal, and going it alone in Atlanta wasn’t one of them.

* * *

Beth looked in the mirror in the downstairs bathroom of the house she and Morgan stopped in for the night. Carefully, she wiped the blood away from the wound on her head and covered it with gauze. She got lucky, the medicine cabinet had an ACE bandage and an expired antibiotic prescription. Her hair was stained red and pink throughout and she looked back longingly at the bathtub behind her. What she wouldn’t have given for a bath. A real bath, not a rinse in a creek or a rag and bucket.

Morgan got a fire started while she cleaned up. The house had a fireplace and they found a pile of logs under the covered garage when they first arrived.

She used a pair of manicure scissors to cut the stitches in her cheek and pulled them out with pink tweezers from the same nail kit. The scars were red and angry but healed. Maybe they’d fade with time and she wouldn’t have to spend the rest of her life—however long that was— with Grady Memorial souvenirs permanently etched into her face.

“Beth?” Morgan called through the door.

“Yeah, I’m comin’.”

“No rush, when you’re done there’s a room upstairs with clothes that might fit you.”

“Thanks, Morgan,” she called back. Morgan was a good person, Beth decided. As hesitant as she was to ever use that title again considering what happened the last time she let herself believe in human decency, she decided being afraid didn’t have to mean losing hope in people. Maybe the good ones do survive and maybe Morgan was one of the good ones and if he could make it then so could her family and maybe they’d all find each other again.

Daryl was alive. He made it out of the house. He found the others. He found her. And now it was her turn to find him—all of them, but him especially.

Upstairs, Beth dug through a dresser in a bedroom that, judging by the purple painted walls and boy-band posters, likely belonged to a girl a little younger than her. It never ceased to be surreal, wearing a dead girl’s clothes. Maybe she, whoever she was, bought those jeans at the mall with her friends or got that top as a Christmas gift or saved allowance for a month to buy those sneakers. All of her clothes fit Beth, a lot of them were things she would’ve bought herself and she wondered idly if maybe in another life they would’ve been friends.

She changed her shoes but kept her laces and founded a few hair ties and a tennis bracelet in a drawer that she slipped onto her wrist.

* * *

_“Let's stop here, huh?” The Georgia sun beat down unforgiving on her shoulders. They’d walked since sunup and hadn’t found anything any close to resembling habitable before then. In faded green letters the storefront said_

_JUST BAIT!_

_HUNTING & FISHING SUPPLIES _

_OPEN 5AM TO 6PM_

_MONDAY-SATURDAY_

_“Says they ain’t open Sunday.”_

_“How do you know it's Sunday?”_

_“How do you know it ain't?”_

_“Whatever just knock, Dixon,” she said with mock annoyance._

_The inside of the store was as dusty and derelict as the exterior, though it’s unlikely the place was ever 5 stars. A thick layer of dust covered every surface, the musky smell of long rotted bait hung in the air. Beth took the left, Daryl took the right, and they cleared the store—which was really just a single room with a couple of shelves and a cash register and a small back room that the owner must’ve used as an office—fairly quickly._

_A few bottles of water sat untouched on one of the shelves along with 2 bags of trail mix, some fishing line, and a couple of cheap looking pocketknives. The store hadn’t been touched for a while, but Beth and Daryl were clearly not its first customers._

_“I’m gonna look through the back room,” Daryl said, “Check up at the front. Maybe he left a gun under the counter or something’.”_

_“How do you know the owner was a man?”_

_“Sports Illustrated calendar on the wall in the office.”_

_“What month does the calendar say?”_

_“March.”_

_“Is she pretty?” Beth teased. Daryl’s face went red and she laughed hard enough that he couldn’t help but smile a little bit too in spite of himself. He waved her off and walked into the back room._

_At the front of the store Beth found stale, old jerky, a cash register with a broken lock, and a place under the counter where a gun had likely been at one point but was no longer. On top of the counter, there was a small rack with lighters and another with shoelaces which she pocketed immediately. A third rack had bracelets made out of stone beads on elastic thread. She picked out the prettiest of the bunch—bright blue turquoise—and put it on with the rest of her bracelets._

_“You find anyhin’?” Beth called out._

_“Not a damn thing,” Daryl called back, “You?”_

_“Bracelets, lighters, mix match shoelaces.”_

_“Guess we can have burnt shoelaces for dinner.”_

_“Ha ha, Daryl, very funny."_


	3. Waffle Cone

_Beth stabbed her knife through the fifth walker skull of the day and found herself longing for the winter months when the heat and humidity weren’t so oppressive and the walker brains less rank._

_“Daryl. I want ice cream.”_

_“Icecream?”_

_“Yeah, ice cream. You know, the frozen dessert?”_

_“I know what ice cream is, I just don’t know what you expect me to do about it.”_

_“Well, Mr. Tracker,” she turned to face him with her arms crossed at her chest, wearing that defiant grin—the one that used to piss him off but, lately, was starting to grow on him— ”Track me down a Dairy Queen. Waffle cone, please.”_

* * *

It was day 5 of what was expected to be at least a month-long trek to Washington-- just about a week since Grady. They’d already lost one set of cars and hadn’t made it even close to the state line.

Noah had family in Virginia, _had_ being the operative word. He had family in Virginia the last time he was there—he hadn’t been there in a year. 1 year might as well be a hundred at the end of the world. But Rick, in part because he was a genuinely good person but mostly because he needed there to be an honest to god “safe place” just as much as the rest of them, decided it wouldn’t hurt to at least check it out. Worst case scenario they'd continue on to Washington and best case maybe they wouldn’t need to.

Daryl had no desire to leave Georgia. If it were up to him, he’d pitch a tent up in Blue Ridge and make do until his number came up—maybe _that’s_ why it wasn’t up to him. He thought idly about leaving but that part of him that was still Merle’s lapdog wouldn’t let him just walk away from Rick and the others. He hated them a little bit. Rick, Noah, Abraham— especially Abraham. He hated them for what happened to Beth. He hated that Noah lived and Beth died. He hated that Abraham had everyone so convinced that Eugene’s miracle cure existed when the guy was clearly an idiot. As far as he was concerned the only “good people” left alive were Carl and Judith and sometimes even Carl walked the line.

He hated that they all wanted to leave and that he was obliged to follow, to leave the only place he’d ever known as if anywhere else could possibly be any better. Atlanta was a death trap, what made them think D.C. wouldn’t be and, on the off-fucking-chance that it wasn’t, what made them think they deserved better. D.C. was the same “somewhere better” Rick had been promising since their first winter on the road.

The night after the farm burnt to the ground he said, “there’s gotta be a place.” And maybe there was, maybe D.C could finally be that place.

Except that it couldn’t be because Beth wouldn’t be there.

* * *

_“Ugh! I can’t do this. Just go on without me.”_

_“Yeah sure, drama queen.”_

_“You know what not all of us can just wear a sleeveless shirt and be content traipsin’ through the woods in 100-degree heat!”_

_A rustling in the brush just beyond them put Daryl on high alert. He raised his bow and stood at attention, listening, and waiting for the rustling to start again. Beth, seated on the forest floor with her back against a tall oak, took her knife from her belt and began to cut her jeans into shorts. Sure, it was impractical apocalypse fashion but the idea of walking another step with sweaty, itchy, denim rubbing against her already mosquito-bitten legs made her want to just lay down and let the earth reclaim her._

_“I’m gonna take a look,” Daryl said. “See if there’s any tracks up ahead. Stay here? Shout and I’ll hear ya.”_

_“Mmhmm. Chocolate waffle cone with sprinkles.”_

_“Yeah yeah… Find your damn Dairy Queen and your nasty ass sprinkles too,” He muttered and started off in the direction of the noise. Beth grinned and tore the fabric free from her leg._

* * *

The walker stopped him dead in his tracks, really knocked the wind out of him. He didn’t mean to freeze up, knife still raised and ready to strike, but the blonde hair and the ponytail and the dead, glazed-over eyes were just too much. Too much like her. Even though he knew it couldn’t be her; even though he knew she was locked in an old Chrysler’s trunk rotting away back in Atlanta, all he could see were Beth’s blonde hair and Beth’s blue eyes stumbling towards him. Every step the walker took he took another step back like dance partners in some kind of sick waltz.

_It’s not her._

_It’s not her._

_She’s not her._

It dropped to the ground, dead, headless; its blood dripping from the end of Michonne’s sword.

“Dixon. That isn’t her, you know that. That’s not Beth.”

He nodded, staring down at the blonde head in the pool of blood. Her name echoed in his ears.

* * *

_Her journal was one of the few things to make it out of the prison, but she tried not to think about that. She wrote with a purple glitter pen she’d found in a little girl’s bedroom in one of the houses they’d search before they stopped going into towns. It was a part of a matching set, the purple, a blue, and a pink one that didn’t have a cap anymore since she’d given it to Daryl to chew on so he’d quit putting his fingers in his mouth. Nail-biting was a gross enough habit when they weren’t perpetually covered in a layer of blood and guts and grime._

_Before, she’d thought idly about becoming a writer—a poet. Songs are poetry, right? Why not do both? Like Jim Morrison or Patti Smith, writing poems and singing songs; going places, seeing things. She was halfway through a list of places she’d have liked to visit if the world hadn’t ended when she heard Daryl’s footsteps— maybe it should’ve felt odd having the sound of someone’s footsteps crunching twigs and leaves committed to memory, but it wasn’t any weirder than the fact that back at the prison and before Daryl definitely knew everyone’s footsteps and could tell you where anyone was at any given moment—coming through the brush._

_“Hey, Greene!” He called out, “C’mon, got somethin’ to show you.”_

_That’s all Beth needed to hear. She tucked her journal into her bag with the new strips of denim she figured they could find a use for, dusted off her shorts, and followed him back between the trees._

_They walked in companionable silence for nearly half an hour when Daryl stopped in front of her so abruptly, she almost walked right into his back._

_“I don’t think they got waffle cones here but…” They broke the tree line and entered an oval-shaped clearing with a pond sitting just off-center and wildflowers blooming in the taller grass. Beth had never been so excited to see a grimy, shallow, pond in her life. Her face lit up and she was off in an instant, ditching her boots and bag on the bank and running right into the water._

_“Can we stay??”_

_She had that look on her face, the same one she had when they burnt down that moonshine still, the one he remembered her having when Judith crawled for the first time, the one he just couldn’t say no to for reasons he couldn’t even start to begin to unpack. Daryl nodded and Beth beamed back at him._

_He found a log to sit on near the water’s edge and pulled out his knife to sharpen it, a nice repetitive motion to clear his mind to. Beth walked out of the water and dug in her backpack for the bar of soap and a travel-sized bottle of Pantene conditioner she’d been lucky enough to find in the same house she found the glitter pens._

_“You’re not comin’ in?” Beth asked._

_“Nope, someone’s gotta keep watch.”_

_“What’s the matter, can’t swim? Can’t swim and can’t ride a horse,” she teased, “What kinda Georgia boy are you?”_

_“Pushin’ your luck over there, Greene,” he said without any bite and pointed his knife at her passively._

_“I’ll keep watch for you when I’m done.” Leaving no room for argument, Beth stripped off her tee-shirt, left it with her boots, and walked back out until the water was up to her knees._

_She was so beautiful, and he had no idea what to do with that._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Told ya not to hold me to the once-a-week update thing. We'll get Beth's perspective next time. 
> 
> Let me know if there's anything specific you want to see, canon or otherwise. I'm good to keep this going for as long as it continues to provide me with serotonin so there is time and room for just about anything. xxx

**Author's Note:**

> This story will basically be Daryl and Beth (who is presumed dead) post-Coda both making their way north, missing each other, thinking back on the good times, and having some fun along the way. It's sad and it's going to stay sad; however, it will end-- whenever that is, I'll probably keep writing this until I get sick of it-- with them being reunited. That's not a spoiler, I'm writing this with the intention of having them pine until they meet again. 
> 
> No Negan, No saviors, Little if any Alexandria-- it's a good old fashion "on the road" story told in real-time and flashbacks from Beth and Daryl's respective perspectives. 
> 
> I try to update weekly-ish
> 
> If you're looking for a Bethyl story that's a lot less miserable than this one, I have another story called [Linger](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27754972/chapters/67938301) that's largely fluff based. 
> 
> Thanks for reading xxx


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